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Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership
Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership
Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership
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Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership

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The complexity and relentless pace of our world places exceptional demands on leaders today. They work incredibly hard and yet feel that they are not meeting their own expectations of excellence. They feel disconnected from their own values and overburdened. By the thousands, they seek out books on leadership skills, time management, and “getting things done,” but the techniques these volumes offer, useful as they are, don't often don't speak to the leader's fundamental sense that something is missing.

Janice Marturano, a senior executive with decades of experience in Fortune 500 corporations, explains how Mindful Leadership training integrates the practice of mindfulness-meditation and self-awareness-with the practical tools of management, enabling leaders to bring a wider range of their capacities to the challenges at hand. We already know from scientific research that mindfulness practices enhance mental health and improve clarity and focus. FINDING THE SPACE shows how this training has specific value for leaders.

This is not a new “leadership system” to add to the burden of already overworked people. It brings the concepts of mindfulness into the everyday life of anyone in a leadership role, through specific exercises that address practical issues-the calendar, schedule, phone usage, meetings, to-do list, and strategic planning, as well as interpersonal challenges such as listening and working with difficult colleagues.

Leaders who have experienced mindfulness training report that it provides a “transformative experience” with significant improvements in innovation, self-awareness, listening, and making better decisions. In FINDING THE SPACE TO LEAD, Marturano masterfully lays out her proven techniques for promoting mindfulness in the busy executive's working life.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 7, 2014
ISBN9781620402481
Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership
Author

Janice Marturano

Janice Marturano was for many years a senior executive and deputy general counsel at General Mills, a Fortune 200 corporation; she has also worked at Panasonic and Nabisco. At General Mills she initiated the company's program in mindfulness for leaders, which has helped earn it the #1 ranking among American businesses for executive training. She is now the Director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, which she founded and which offers this training to leaders from corporations, nonprofits, and other institutions. She lives in New Jersey. She has been profiled in the Financial Times and now blogs for the Huffington Post. She was invited to speak on Mindful Leadership at the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos.

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    Kind of interesting, but kind of boring. There were a lot of good 'blurbs' to start each chapter. Was hoping for more inspiration.

Book preview

Finding the Space to Lead - Janice Marturano

Author

Introduction: Training the Mind to Cultivate Leadership Excellence

Leading people is one of the most challenging roles we can take on in life. It requires a dizzying array of skills, a strong education, and passion. Most often, when we take on a leadership role, we do so because we want to make a difference. As leaders, we take for granted that we will work long hours, make great sacrifices, and ride the roller coaster of success and failure. However, the busy-ness that accompanies being a leader in today’s 24/7/365 interconnected world often distracts us from what’s important and limits our ability to lead with excellence. When we are really honest with ourselves, we may have to admit that there are far too many times when we feel as though we’re spending the day putting out fires and wasting time rather than doing our best work.

Does it need to be this way? Happily, the answer is no.

You can learn to lead with excellence by cultivating your innate capabilities to focus on what is important, to see more clearly what is presenting itself, to foster greater creativity, and to embody compassion. When you are able to do so, you are much more likely to make the conscious choices we need our leaders to make. These choices often lead to a win-win-win scenario: good for the organization, good for the employees, and good for the community.

HOW I CAME TO MINDFUL LEADERSHIP

I came to mindful leadership somewhat unexpectedly while I was vice president, public responsibility and deputy general counsel at General Mills, one of the world’s largest corporations. (I talk more about the circumstances that led me to mindfulness training and its transformative effect on me personally in Chapter 2.) I was leading the high-intensity life that most corporate officers—and other busy people, from ministers to moms—know well, dealing with nonstop demands in the workplace and outside it. It took a personal crisis, but I discovered that mindfulness training would teach me to find more of the very thing we need most in our lives: space.

By space, I don’t mean literally more square feet in our offices (though that might help). I mean mental and emotional space—bandwidth, to use the Internet metaphor: the capacity to see, feel, hear, and reflect on what is in front of us and what is inside of us. When we have that space, we can deal with even an urgent problem in a calm, creative, and humane way, rather than have an expedient reaction to the pressure.

I helped train first a core group of officer and director colleagues at General Mills, and later hundreds of employees throughout the organization. The leaders at General Mills, a company consistently recognized for its leadership education and corporate social responsibility, embraced the training for themselves and for their teams. Ultimately, a global demand for this training began to develop outside of General Mills, and this led me to found, in 2010, the Institute for Mindful Leadership (Institute). To date, business leaders and organizational employees from more than sixty different organizations from around the world—Fortune 500 companies, entrepreneurs, nonprofit directors, military officers, academic administrators, lawyers, teachers, and healthcare professionals—have been trained using mindful leadership curricula. And in 2013, the Institute was invited to bring a mindful leadership workshop to perhaps the most prominent gathering of leaders from diverse organizations: the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

HOW YOU CAN BENEFIT FROM TRAINING IN MINDFUL LEADERSHIP

Mindfulness is not about stress reduction or taking deep breaths. It is not a religion. It’s a methodology that trains a capacity of your mind that generally receives little or no training. Just as we know that your body has innate capabilities that can be strengthened through physical training, we now know from more than three decades of research that you can also train your mind to strengthen its capabilities. Finding the Space to Lead will show you a way to begin this training so you can learn to lead and live with excellence.

Part 1 describes what mindful leadership is, why I started training in it and then training others, and why it is so effective in developing leadership excellence.

In Part 2, you will learn a wide variety of simple methods to cultivate your capacity to lead with excellence, including meditations, reflections, and purposeful pauses (a method to train your mind by bringing attention to routine or especially chaotic moments in the day). All of these have been tried, tested, and refined in mindful leadership workshops and retreats over the past several years. Many of the meditations and reflections are also available in audio and can be accessed by going to the Finding the Space to Lead website (www.FindingtheSpacetoLead.com).

In Part 3, you will be invited to take the training into applications and questions for contemplation that will help you evolve from a manager who is good at execution to a leader who consistently makes a difference.

Appendix 1 contains an index of all of the meditations, purposeful pauses, and reflections used in Finding the Space to Lead, so you can quickly refer to any one that you would like to practice at any given time. In Appendix 2, you will find an easy-to-follow sample approach for developing a personalized program using the elements described in this book. And throughout the book, there are stories from leaders whose lives have been touched by mindful leadership training. All of the stories are authentic although the names of people and organizations have been changed to preserve privacy and business confidentiality.

We all have the potential to lead with excellence, and we simply can no longer afford to make decisions and choices without bringing all of our capabilities to the people, issues, or opportunities at hand. Of course, it takes more than good intentions to be able to change the overconnected, distracted way we go through much of our lives.

We need to train the mind’s innate capabilities to notice when we are on autopilot or becoming distracted by thoughts of the past or the future, and then to redirect our full attention to whom and what we are encountering in this moment. When the mind is trained to be fully attentive, even in the midst of chaos, we have the space to make more wise and conscious choices. Whether you are leading a global organization, a small partnership, a team of colleagues, a hospital, a community group, or a family, Finding the Space to Lead will help you do just that.

Part 1

What Is Mindful Leadership?

Chapter 1

Leading in the Midst of Chaos

Opportunities for leadership are all around us. The capacity for leadership is deep within us.

SECRETARY OF STATE MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

It’s been a long day, but you are finally in your car driving home. You flip on the radio to listen to the news, and amid the usual stories about the economy and the most recent skirmishes around the world, you hear the announcer mention that a national food brand is being recalled because it may contain bacteria that can cause serious gastrointestinal illness. And it involves your favorite brand of chocolate chip cookies! Now you’re only partially listening to the rest of the news as your mind begins to wonder: Do I have any of those cookies in my pantry right now? Did I eat some last night? Did my son take some to school in his lunch? I was feeling a little queasy last Sunday; did I have any cookies that day?

Ever wonder how national recalls are decided? They can be some of the most challenging decisions an organization encounters. At stake are the safety of consumers, the company’s hard-won reputation for quality, millions of dollars, and perhaps even some people’s jobs. A decision needs to be made in a very short time, a day or so at most. When a company has clear evidence of a quality issue, the decision is simple. However, there are times when data are inconclusive and the leaders are not aligned on the decision. What then?

A couple of years ago, Jim, a veteran executive of a Fortune 500 company, told me about just such a recall. He also told me how the work that he and his team had been doing with mindful leadership played a major role in a very challenging decision-making process.

My day began like most days. Too many meetings, too many priorities, and too many potential opportunities. Then a call came in. It wasn’t just any call, it was the kind of call that had the power to turn the day on its head. It erased every meeting from my calendar and demanded that I drop every other priority. A potential serious contamination issue had arisen with an important product line. When a concern about the safety of a food product emerges, I am one of three leaders of a team responsible for recommending to the CEO whether or not to recall the product. Sue, Mark, and I were seasoned executives, and we had led the team through potential recall situations before. Fortunately, these instances were rare in my company, and the team in place to handle them had been together for many years. We knew each other well, and we had great respect for each other’s expertise and experience.

Within an hour of the call coming in, our recall team was equipped with data, research, and informed opinions and questions. The first step was to understand the magnitude of the problem. Unfortunately, in this case, I soon learned that an internationally distributed chocolate candy product might contain bacteria that could cause serious illness, especially for the elderly and young children.

In these situations, there is a huge amount of pressure. We were very concerned about any potential threat to the consumer’s health, and we were also concerned about the potential public relations issues and the fact that a recall can cost millions of dollars and significantly damage the product’s brand. The recall team began to work through what we knew, and what additional information we could obtain through testing. We notified the appropriate government agencies and advised them of the status of the investigation into the potential problem, and we gathered outside experts, microbiologists and food scientists, to help with technical questions. I knew it all had to be done in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If there was a problem with our product, we would need to bring our recommendation to the CEO quickly to protect our consumers.

Generally the test results and consumer complaint information enable us to reach a consensus fairly quickly. We confirm a quality issue, or we disprove the allegation, and the decision becomes clear. It is based on analysis and facts. But it wouldn’t be so simple this time. This time, despite working around the clock with the team, in hours and hours of meetings examining reams of scientific analyses and test results, we were left with only an unsubstantiated finding that the product might be the cause of an outbreak of illness in an area of the country where food-borne illness had seen a spike and one of the possible products involved was our candy. No conclusive data. No smoking gun. No incontrovertible evidence. This time we knew that our decision would have to be based on something more than the data and expert advice we had heard. This time Sue, Mark, and I knew that we would need to rely on our experience and intuition to reach that final decision.

In the early evening of the second day, time was running out. Sue, Mark, and I left our recall team and gathered in an empty conference room to deliberate. As we settled into our chairs, Mark suggested that we each begin with a brief monologue to share our overall analysis of the situation and our opinion on the recall. I remember feeling a sense of relief that we each had been trained in mindful communication so we were comfortable with using monologues and deep listening. And, as we began the process, I privately hoped that there would be a consensus among us. There wasn’t. Now what?

One option would have been to begin a discussion about our points. You know, the kind of typical debating that can absorb enormous amounts of time and rarely results in a great choice. More often it is a compromise, or a choice that is only supported by a few of those in attendance. Too much was at stake here for that to be our next step.

So, rather than continue with a discussion, Sue suggested that we let what we had heard sink in and take some time for reflection. We agreed to reconvene in an hour. Mark left the room and took a walk around the building. Sue found a quiet, empty room in which to sit. I found a cup of coffee and returned to my office, closed the door, and allowed myself the quiet I needed to take in all that I had heard and felt during the course of the day—the quiet that would allow me to listen carefully to my intuition.

An hour later, we returned to the conference room and shared our opinions once more. This time we had reached a clear and strong consensus. It would not be a welcome decision to many in the organization, but it was now clear to the three of us that we would need to recommend a recall.

As with most difficult decisions, arriving at a clear choice was critical in Jim’s story. Jim, Mark, and Sue felt more confident being able to speak with the CEO (and others) from the strong foundation and mutual support of a unanimous decision. This was a decision born not from the data, which remained inconclusive, but from their collective experience and intuition. When they took their unanimous recommendation to the CEO, he asked only one question, Did anyone have a different point of view? When the response was no, he quickly agreed with the recommendation. Their clarity helped the CEO as well: he could feel confident in the choice to authorize an expensive recall because all of his advisers had arrived at the same conclusion. It was the right thing to do.

Now everyone’s energies could turn to the most effective and efficient ways to carry out the recall. It wasn’t what anyone wanted to happen, but the decision was easier to implement and live with over the long run because they had taken the time necessary to be clear about the best choice. This was not a quick, reactive decision in the swirl of uncertainty. It was not a decision that arose from the exhaustion of a long debate. This was a choice the team leaders made using their ability to know when it was important to allow the mind to settle so that they had a better chance to discern the best choice.

As managers trained in mindful leadership, Jim, Sue, and Mark knew how to combine their traditional business and leadership skills and hard-won experience with their training of the mind. Mindful leadership practices and exercises had taught them to notice the strong pull to react, the mind’s propensity to narrow the focus when under stress, the dynamics of difficult conversations that can sometimes be resolved by reaching the lowest common denominator to gain agreement rather than the most skillful choice, and the negative effects of information overload. The training also helped them choose to hold the ambiguity of not knowing the answer for a while, providing the quiet and spaciousness needed to see clearly and to respond. Neither their traditional business training nor mind training alone would have sufficed to help them reach an optimal decision. It’s the combination of the two that proved to be so powerful.

Jim, Sue, and Mark had the courage to stop for a while, to allow the dust to settle, and to use all of their capabilities to help guide the decision. In the midst of the chaos, these leaders exhibited leadership excellence. All too often we are unaware of the effect that being in a pressure-filled situation has on our ability to lead with excellence. We have the innate ability to be fully present for those tough decisions—for all of our decisions—but we need to notice when we are moving into a reactive mode and learn practices that will help us make conscious choices.

Everyone has the capacity to lead with excellence. You may be in a position right now that requires you to make decisions affecting those around you and wider circles beyond—and so you consider yourself a leader and you are seen as a leader by others. Or you may not hold a leadership role per se and yet touch the lives of others

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